Soil Carbon Cowboys
Adaptive Multi-Paddock Grazing Helps Ranchers Build Soil and Profit
by Torrey Douglass
Doug Peterson, a farmer and soil health specialist from Newtown, Missouri, used to rotate his cattle in a 35-day cycle onto different parts of his land in order to distribute their impact. But when a broken water tank caused him to skip a section, doubling its rest time, it led to a revelation. “That whole field was a mess,” he said, describing how the cows eventually came back through, ate down the grass, and were moved off again. Being a busy farmer, he didn’t think much of it until the following year, when that particular field produced twice as much forage as any other on his property. “That was a real a-ha moment for me,” he remembers. He didn’t yet understand how it had happened, but if there was a way to double the food for his herd without additional inputs from him, he was determined to figure it out.
Carbon Cowboys, a series of 10 short films by Peter Byck, are full of brain-sparking anecdotes like this. Men and women stand in fields thick with wildflowers and talk about how it wasn’t like them to change their ways, but they are so glad they did. In accents ranging from clipped Saskatchewan to a warm Georgia drawl, farmers share their stories of struggle and success. Rancher Gabe Brown of Bismarck, North Dakota, talks about the difficulties brought on by four years of crop failure. “I’m sure that I wasn’t a pleasant man to be around, in that it was extremely high stress. But my wife and I will tell you it was the best thing to happen to us … because it forced us to start looking at the soil.”
Soil health is at the heart of Byck’s films, as ranchers from all over tell different parts of the same story—once they start moving carbon from the atmosphere into the soil through regenerative farming practices, everything gets better. They can raise more cattle with fewer inputs on land that is left healthier as a result, retaining more moisture, flourishing with microbes, pushing up a “salad mix” of grasses (many once believed to be extinct), and mitigating flooding.
The primary method for achieving this farmer’s fantasy is AMP—Adaptive Multi-Paddock grazing, an approach that mimics the relationship between buffalo herds and pastureland. Ranchers move a single herd through sections of land portioned off by mobile electric fences, sometimes multiple times in a single day. The cattle eat down the grasses, leave nutrient-rich dung and urine, and trample what they leave behind to create a protective mat of “litter” that helps retain moisture and keep the ground cool. It’s then essential to get the herd off the land quickly and give it ample time to rest. Allen Williams of Starkville, Mississippi, sums it up by saying, “We graze it and then we get the heck off it.”
Combined with the increased moisture retention, the rest period allows long-dormant grass seeds to grow. The Ranney Ranch in New Mexico gets just 14” of rain per year, yet when they transitioned from continuous grazing to AMP, their previous menu of four to five grass species jumped to over 40. Those seeds were in the soil all the time, just waiting until the right conditions returned to blossom, conditions that would not be possible without the cows.
Cattle are often depicted as significant (if unwitting) contributors to environmental problems. Staying on a piece of land for too long exacerbates erosion, the methane they emit contributes to climate change, and beef has a notoriously large water footprint (although over 90% of that footprint is “green water,” or precipitation, not water from wells or municipal systems). Yet with AMP, livestock are essential to restoring soil health and reaping the many benefits that come with it. Gabe Brown recalls how, in 1993, his fields could only absorb ½” of rain every hour, while today they can hold over 8”. Increasing the soil’s moisture capacity means rain doesn’t turn into runoff, where it would deposit sediment (often contaminated with herbicides and fertilizer) into waterways, remove valuable topsoil off the farm, and cause flooding. And with higher moisture in the soil, grasses last longer into the dry season—Ranney Ranch reports their feed bill has dropped two-thirds as a result of adopting AMP.
And it’s not just the feed bill that goes down when a rancher shifts to AMP. The wild legumes it restores add nitrogen to the soil, removing the need for microbe-destroying fertilizers. Herbicides are also crossed off the shopping list, as some “weeds” can offer the foraging cattle more protein than alfalfa. The cost of equipment and labor for distributing those herbicides and fertilizers—as well as that time spent—go back in the rancher’s pocket. The animals are healthier, too, with some ranchers reporting a 90% drop in medicine costs. One could say that AMP is the poster child for the popular recommendation to “work smarter, not harder.” Rancher Neil Dennis of Saskatchewan captures it perfectly when he quips, “I’ve got more spare time on my hands than I know what to do with … If I was to start this when I was your age, I’d’ve had 15 kids by now ‘cause I’d spend so much time in the house.”
With Carbon Cowboys, Byck has tackled a near-impossible task—he’s made a climate change film series both beautiful and optimistic. A journalism professor and documentary filmmaker with Arizona State University, he started focusing on climate change in 2007. That led him to explore the impact of grazing practices, and in 2014 he released his first 12 minute short, Soil Carbon Cowboys, featuring ranchers from Starkville, Mississippi; Bismarck, North Dakota; and Wawona, Saskatchewan. Despite their varied seasonal conditions, land and herd sizes, and yearly rainfall, all of them credit AMP for improving their farms’ soil, herd, and financial health, as well as their overall quality of life.
Thanks to the success of Soil Carbon Cowboys, nine more films followed, many in response to the resistance Byck heard from more traditional farmers when sharing his findings, something he calls the “yeah, but” syndrome (as in, “yeah, but it can’t work on MY farm”). Think it can’t work in Kansas? Check out During the Drought (12 minutes). Think it’s not viable for a large Texas ranch? Take a look at Herd Impact (23 minutes). When asked what surprised him in the course of filmmaking, Byck shares, “If there’s a downside [to AMP grazing], I haven’t found it.” As a journalist, he expected to encounter some cons mixed in with all those pros of AMP, but so far his research has only revealed benefits.
Some ranchers report experiencing the benefits of AMP within months or just a few years, benefits like improved herd and soil health, increased financial stability, and reduced vulnerability to flooding, all while transforming destructive atmospheric carbon into constructive carbon in the soil. Doug Peterson sums things up neatly when he says, “We’ve been taught for a long time that we couldn’t change the land. The soil was what it was … we couldn’t change it significantly in a human lifetime. We don’t believe that any longer. With the things that we know now about organisms in the soil and adding livestock and diversity, we can make pretty significant changes in just a few years on the land.”
Each film is like a short walk down a country road, with a tale told in the farmers’ own words interspersed with before-and-after comparison images and enchanting slow motion shots—a flock of birds soaring over grassland or bees humming among the wildflowers. But the real heroes of the films are the ranchers, soil experts, and farmers, people who are equal parts plainspoken, warm, and wise. Byck captures their fortitude and humor, their devotion to the land and their love of the animals, both wild and domestic, that it supports. I bet, like me, you’ll be at least a little bit in love with each of them by the end of the series.
These days Byck and his team of scientists, many of whom work with consulting group Understanding Ag, are deep in a research project centered in the southeastern region of the US. Their findings will eventually generate both academic research papers and a full length documentary film. In the meantime, enjoy the shorts at carboncowboys.org, take a look at what you can do to improve soil health, and when you’re considering solutions for climate change, don’t discount the humble cow.
See the whole film series at CarbonCowboys.org.
Access consulting services at UnderstandingAg.com.
